Nespola

Arresting in scope and nuance, Anders Villani’s third collection voices the tension between answering a demand for care and the inner stories that question our capacity to give and receive it. Crises in two relationships—siblings; intimate partners—become more than calls for the embodied love that care requires, and is. They become tests of humanness, in ways the book’s studies of childhood and adolescence contextualise.

Employing the supple formal control, narrative propulsion, braiding of myth and memory and dream, and the rigorous, compassionate self-inquiry that charged his first two collections, Villani gestures—in moments of access; in lapses and ejections; in almost impalpable feeling; in presence—towards a core behind core beliefs. A poetic space, where the loquat—nespola—fruits.

‘Using seemingly everyday materials and sensations, Nespola hums with its lucid, uncanny tableaux of ambiguous intimacy. These audacious, haunting narratives and lyrics, peppered with ecstatic punctures and folds, know what our bodies bury and hold. They ask, “how much of myself, to save / myself, can I destroy?”. Anders Villani is a wayfinding alchemist.’
Andy Jackson

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Anders Villani

Totality

$19.95

ByAnders Villani

With stunning formal range and architectural design, Anders Villani’s second collection explores how violence engenders selfhood by calling it into radical question. What does it mean to suffer in a body that also symbolises power? How can poetry, alert to the ‘blur’ and the ‘panorama’, trace this moral dissonance at its subtlest and most intimate? How do notions of illness and recovery, victim and perpetrator, rest on fraught archetypes, and what alternate understandings emerge when these foundations waver? Villani roves between myth, confession, narrative, and dream to address such questions—not abstractly, but through the experiences of a subject whose capacity to love and be loved is at stake.

Novelistic in arc and scope, lyrically sensuous and searching, Totality invites readers on a journey of self-inquiry that dredges new channels in the contemporary poetics of trauma. As secrets reveal and conceal themselves, through the crucible of hypermasculinity, and with unstinting compassion, Villani’s poems venture an expansive and timely music.

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‘It’s rare to read poetry with my heart in my mouth but under every line in Nespola, just about, lives an opening, a sharp turn, a deep fall into a world and dislodgement from it. Something is always coming or ramping up, and the language – exquisite and unafraid – feels on the brink. In a line or a stanza, that fast, we’re deep inside entangled lives and all the rage and vulnerability are there too, all that we try to forget about the past and cannot know about the future.’
Maria Tumarkin

‘This devastating new collection by Anders Villani is the work of a poet at the height of his powers. With his trademark beauty, precision and feeling, Villani returns to the questions that have animated his singular body of work, an unflinching examination of gender and family, landscape and the body. In Nespola, I was expecting a lot and I was not disappointed.’
Dominic Amarena